Portable electronics communication equipment, more particularly cellular communicators, such as cellular telephones have incurred phenomenal growth since their inception in 1983, and are anticipated to continue at record growth rates. It is currently estimated that there are well over 20 million subscribers in the United States alone, and approximately 50 million subscribers worldwide. Operation of cellular telephones has been traditionally by cellular analog technology. In order to keep up with this ever increasing demand for service, new digital signal cellular telephone systems have recently been introduced. Digital signal technology systems, such as Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) systems, including North American Digital Cellular (IS-54), Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), Personal Digital Cellular (PDC) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology standards, have brought about an increased capacity for subscribers, and lower design costs. These lower design costs have led to a lower cost per subscriber and improvement of call quality, including better and more consistent sound, enhanced privacy, improved coverage characteristics, and increased talk time for portables due to precise power control. In addition, digital cellular technology provides for enhanced features, such as multiple vocoders simultaneously within the system which provide for better voice quality over current vocoders, short message services, over-the-air activation, sleep mode, subscriber unit ringing, subscriber access control, and data/fax capabilities.
Traditional analog cellular systems use radio frequency channels to operate. Typically, only one subscriber at a time is assigned to a specific channel, more particularly a discrete slice of the RF spectrum. No other conversations can access the channel until the subscriber's call is finished, or until that original call is handed off to a different channel by the system. Digital cellular systems utilize unique digital codes, rather than separate radio frequency signals or channels, to differentiate subscribers. During operation, each user is assigned a binary code during a call. At the receiving end, the digital codes are separated out, leaving only the original information. These codes are shared by both the cellular phone and the base station.
Many individuals currently own cellular analog telephone devices which operate using the traditional analog signal technology. Due to the benefits and enhanced features offered by digital cellular technology, there is a desire for many of these current analog cellular technology users to convert or switch to digital cellular technology. One of the most common factors encountered by today's cellular user in making this decision to convert to digital cellular technology is the initial cost of obtaining the required digital equipment. To aid in this conversion or deployment of digital cellular technology into the mainstream there exists a need for conversion equipment which will allow for the continued use of the already owned analog cellular equipment.
Accordingly, it is a purpose of the present invention to provide for a dual system portable electronic communicator that allows for portable electronic equipment to operate utilizing both analog cellular technology and digital cellular technology within an existing analog cellular communicator.
It is a further purpose of the present invention to provide a new and improved dual system portable electronic communicator that allows for modification of an existing analog cellular communicator to a communicator capable of utilizing digital cellular signals.
It is a further purpose of the present invention to provide a new and improved dual system portable electronic communicator that provides for digital cellular technology to be incorporated into a standard cellular communicator battery pack.
It is a further purpose of the present invention to provide for a wireless interface between the digital cellular technology communicator and the analog cellular technology communicator.